"What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication." – Dennis Ritchie.

"I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology." – Whitfield Diffie.

"In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use." – Yukihiro Matsumoto.

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." – Steve Jobs.

"The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation." – Sergey Brin.

"It's perfectly appropriate to be upset. I thought of it in a slightly different way – like a space that we were exploring and, in the early days, we figured out this consistent path through the space: IP, TCP, and so on. What's been happening over the last few years is that the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] is filling the rest of the space with every alternative approach, not necessarily any better. Every possible alternative is now being written down. And it's not useful." – Jon Postel.

"Without a corporate set of numbers, we have a bunch of talented singers singing different songs. We have Aretha Franklin singing soul, the Eagles singing classic rock, the Thompson Twins singing grunge and Celine Dion singing pop. And in the background, we have Dave Brubeck doing jazz accompanied by the Steve Miller Band doing 'Jet Airliner'. The problem is that these artists are all doing it at once and it sounds just terrible. It is a bunch of noise coming from very talented singers. What we need is a little coordination among these talented artists. We need for them to be singing from the same songbook and from the same page in that songbook. And that’s what a data warehouse does. That is the best way to understand the value that a data warehouse provides an organization." – Bill Inmon.

"I thought it [Unix] would be useful to essentially anybody like me because it was not built for someone else or some third party. It was written for Dennis and me and our group to do its work. And I think it would have been useful to anybody who did the kind of work that we did. And therefore, I always thought it was something really good that was going to take off." – Ken Thompson.